Okay, so I had this idea to make a crossword puzzle, but, like, automatically. I’ve seen those fancy generators online, but I wanted to try building one myself. You know, just to see if I could. The title “crossword negligent” is just kind of a joke, because I totally skipped error handling at first. It was more about, “Can I get this basic thing working?” rather than “Is this production-ready?”
I started by grabbing a big list of words. Just a plain text file, nothing fancy. I figured the more words, the better chance of the thing actually working. My initial thought was to just randomly slam words onto a grid, checking for intersections, and if it didn’t work, just try again. Super simple, right?
First Attempt: Brute Force (and Ignorance)
I wrote a little Python script. It would:
- Pick a random word from the list.
- Try to place it horizontally on the grid.
- Pick another random word.
- See if it could intersect with any existing words, vertically.
- If it fit, great! Add it to the grid.
- If not, throw it away and pick another word.
- Repeat until bored (or it actually made a crossword).
I let this run for a while. Like, a long while. I’m pretty sure it was just throwing words at the wall and hoping something would stick. It rarely produced anything that even remotely resembled a crossword. Most of the time, it would get stuck after placing just a few words.
Slightly Less Brute Force
I realized my first attempt was… optimistic. So, I tweaked it a bit. Instead of completely random placement, I added some simple rules:
- If a word could fit, but created an island (a word not connected to the rest), don’t place it.
- Prioritize intersections. If a word could intersect with multiple existing words, go for the one with the most intersections.
This helped… a little. It produced slightly better-looking crosswords, but it was still super slow and unreliable. And, of course, any error in my word list or logic would just cause the whole thing to crash. No graceful handling, no “try again later,” just BOOM. Hence the “negligent” part.
Giving up for the day.
So after messing for hours and making barely something usable. I’m going to do some more serious read-up on algorithms for this kind of thing. There’s gotta be a better way than just throwing spaghetti at the wall, even if it’s just for fun. I’ll be keeping my “negligent” code, though just for comparison when improve on it next time!
